Author Lindsay Pereira: ‘We continue to pay the price for what happened at the Babri Masjid’

Cover jacket of 'The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao' by Lindsay Pereira (Photo Hemal Shroff)

In author and journalist Lindsay Pereira’s second novel The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao, a chawl in Mumbai becomes the setting for a contemporary retelling of the epic Ramayana. A tale that begins a few years before the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and comes to an end a few years after the 1992 riots that tore Mumbai apart, Pereira’s novel is a warning to learn from the mistakes of the past. Edited excerpts from a conversation:

Your first book Gods and Ends (2021) was set in a chawl in Orlem, Malad. This book, too, is set in a chawl in Parel. Is that a familiar setting for you and is that why you keep going back to it?

The settings have a lot to do with economic marginalisation, because I am drawn to characters and stories set at the periphery of middle-class India. I find that people living in the margins often have an acute sense of observation that works very well for me when I’m trying to comment on an aspect of society that I find disturbing. This also helps me create a tone for these voices, allowing pettiness or small-mindedness to reflect their milieu.

Did you set about retelling the Ramayana and then the Babri Masjid narrative got woven into it or vice versa? How organic or seamless was it to weave the two together?

There was no deliberate attempt; I simply began with a question about how modern India would treat the gods and goddesses it perennially claims to respect, and realised that this was a story about hypocrisy. We continue to pay the price for what happened at the Babri Masjid over a quarter of a century ago, and the weaponisation of an epic has a strong role to play in events that have occurred since. Weaving them together was not seamless, but I spent a lot of time looking for moments in which the two narratives could intersect while serving the larger story I was interested in telling.

The chawl-life has been romanticised in many Hindi films. Is this an attempt to present a reality of how things actually are? 

The chawl merely happens to be a setting because it helps the plot. For me, pitting two groups against each other demanded proximity, and chawls as constricted places worked best.

The Hindu-Muslim issue is one of the main themes of the novel. Do you think it is relevant that this book has come out at a time when Nuh demolitions have recently happened in Gurugram near Delhi?

There is no way of predicting a particular act of cruelty, especially given the frequency with which they have been encouraged, perpetuated, and condoned in recent years. I would argue that the issue of a majority against this country’s minorities has never lost its relevance and has been around long before we became a nation.

Just like your first novel, here, too, there is more to despair than to hope for.

I suppose that reflects my looking at what India is turning into and finding little to be hopeful about, despite what government-sponsored television channels would have me believe.

What do you hope that the reader takes back from the story?

This is a warning about how we refuse to learn from our mistakes and compel generations that come after us to repeat them. I am always struck by the fine line between religious belief and bigotry that runs through the history of modern India. This book is an attempt to draw a straight line between what happened in 1992 and where we stand today, teetering as we are at the edge of an abyss of our own making.